Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

jfruh (300774) writes HP's revelation that it's working on a radical new computing architecture that it's dubbed "The Machine" was met with excitement among tech observers this week, but one of HP's biggest competitors remains extremely unimpressed. John Swanson, the head of Dell's software business, said that "The notion that you can reach some magical state by rearchitecting an OS is laughable on the face of it." And Jai Memnon, Dell's research head, said that phase-change memory is the memory type in the pipeline mostly like to change the computing scene soon, not the memristors that HP is working on.

You can remove the CMOS battery or move the Clear CMOS jumper or power on the PC with a special key pressed (depending on the motherboard manufacturer it can be CTRL, or ALT or something else, always well documented).

Nor HP.. HP's quality has tanked hard as well. Most of their Mexico Assembled crap fails quickly. 5 desktops quad i7 top of the line HP boxes, 3 of them had problems that required a major repair like mother board replacement.

It seems that all the computer makers are just building low grade dog food these days.

"With persistent memory, the machine state gets messed up, you are so screwed."

Uh, have you looked into your computer recently? I believe you'll find either this little device called "an HDD" or this other little device called "an SSD". And people with those seldom get screwed.

If you read the article [businessweek.com] from the previous slashdot story [slashdot.org] about HP's "The Machine", you will find that they are not simply trying to use memsistors to replace main memory, but that they are also trying to consolidate the storage memory and working memory into a single piece of memory, this is why it is considered to be substantially different memory architecture which also requires the OS to work a little differently too... if you are old enough think "Ram Disk"

The difference being that usually any stored data to be used by the processor has to first be loaded into working memory from the large slow storage memory... as i'm sure you are aware, which is why SSDs are so popular... but even NAND is many times slower than SDRAM, so the separation remains.

The idea is that if a sufficiently fast, dense, persistent and cheap type of memory can be found then the best of both can be consolidated into one. The concern of the OP is that issues affecting running state could affect the traditionally less dynamic stored state... Working memory is usually treated as volatile and disposable, and your block device is not, but the line is now blurred.

I think it's a reasonable concern, but one that is likely to be addressed by the OS, a less physical separation between what is running state and what is not would need to be implemented, but at the same time the advantages of not "loading" data need to be retained... making everything that goes into the running state duplicate would bring back the "loading" problem slightly.